Product Reviews

There were some jitters in the Mac 3D community when Autodesk's takeover of Alias was announced - after all, apart from a brief appearance of AutoCad in the early 1990s, Autodesk has acted as though the Mac platform doesn't exist. Luckily, however, any fears appear to have been unfounded, as witnessed by this release of Maya 2008 (Version 9) for Mac OS X.

Maya's interface is still pretty daunting when you first fire it up but one new feature strikes you immediately: the View Cube. In the top-right corner by default, this lets you orbit the scene simply by clicking and dragging on the cube, or takes you to the relevant orthogonal view by clicking on the relevant face of the View Cube. It's a welcome alternative to Maya's normal arcane mouse-button/keyboard commands and clunky view buttons. It would be nice to see the concept extended to zooming and panning though.

Maya's smooth Mesh modelling has been given an overhaul in this release. You can now preview a smoothed surface in real time while simultaneously editing the polygon cage from which it is derived. This is naturally great for workflow and efficiency but it's also something that's been around in other modellers for some time. Smooth meshes still have to be converted to polygon meshes for rendering or for dynamics simulations.

Interestingly Autodesk has written the modelling tools to take advantage of multi-core processors - an area normally reserved only for rendering and compositing. There's a new Slide Edge tool in the modelling toolbox that allows the repositioning of an edge without distorting the shape of the surface - and in turn the 'marshalling' of edge to give better deformation characteristics for final character animation. Also improved is Polygon Reduction performance - vitally important when designing for games platforms. As well as producing cleaner meshes without triangulation, the poly reduce algorithm now caches intermediate reduction states, allowing the artist to more easily flip from high- to low-poly renditions of objects. This aspect has also benefited from multi-threading.

Maya's editing space additionally benefits from access to HLSL shaders (high-level shading language). Basically, this means that the OpenGL view is capable of much greater realism in terms of texture display - layered textures are supported too. This is again vital in the realm of games development where the consoles use OpenGL (or DirectX) to render their environments to the screen. Of course, your card will have to be up

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to it.

The Mental Ray 3.6 renderer is included in both versions of Maya - Complete and Unlimited - and its multi-threading code efficiency is improved. This is particularly noticeable when using IPR, Maya's Interactive Photoreal Rendering, which gives live updates of render attributes as you change them. Mental Ray can now render particle systems that previously could be done only via the Maya Hardware Renderer. This is sure to be a big time-saver.

Another refinement in Maya is the option to use a Mental Ray Lens Shader for texture baking instead of the previous lightmaps. The upshot is a substantial increase in speed for this increasingly-important area. (Basically, texture baking allows HDRI/Radiosity lighting to be 'burned' on to a surface, thus producing the ultra-real look of Global Illumination without the processing overhead.)

If Maya is about anything, it's animation control - and this area has not been neglected in the new version. One of the biggest headaches for animation studios is making changes to a character after the character has been rigged - the process by which a character's skeleton gets bound to its skin. The necessity for changes late in the pipeline has been known to reduce technical directors to tears, so the ability to insert, move, delete, connect and disconnect joints in an already-rigged skeleton is sure to have the champagne corks popping in Soho. This type of non-destructive adjustment has been on studios' wish lists for some time. For good measure meshes now have the ability to support multiple Bind Poses - a character's 'neutral' base-state.

It has always been troublesome to rig meshes when they don't conform to this base state. But with multiple bind poses for a single character, that problem simply goes away. Also of interest will be the ability to select objects while in X-Ray mode, enabling this to be used as a standard working environment - no need to flip between textured and X-Ray mode any more.

The components of the Unlimited package have been given an overhaul as well. Cloth now becomes nCloth, for example. This is based on Autodesk's next-generation simulation technology which, known as Maya Nucleus, gives far more accurate results and comes with a slew of presets that you can simply apply and go. Another bonus is that the simulation engine can accept third-party plug-in solvers or even ones written in-house.

Like so many other areas in Maya 2008, Fluid effects give improved multi-threading and performance on multi-processor workstations, while new tools control hair on a per-clump basis. Also a single hair's attributes can vary over its length.

Finally, Maya 2008 is a Universal Binary - there were raised eyebrows when 8.5 came out as PowerPC only - and it runs on Leopard, though there's no 64-bit version as yet. This is a shame because it really could do with more than 2GB of memory. Still, the new improvements should please a lot of customers and it's good to see multi-processor capability being extended into all areas of the program - something that Alias was inexplicably reluctant to do.